Global web traffic plunges as Google servers go down

GLOBAL web traffic plunged by 40 per cent as Google servers went offline for five minutes in an "unprecedented" blackout, according to web experts.

Google admitted a number of its services, from Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went offline for between one and five minutes, but has not given the reason for the outage about 8am AEST yesterday, theDaily Mail reports.

A message on the Google Apps Dashboard said: "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour."

The blackout led to a 40 per cent plunge in global web traffic according to analytics firm GoSquared.

Technology writer Neil McAllister told theDaily Mail experts would be nervous as they attempted to find the cause of the disruption.

"Exactly how an operation like Google's can even go dark like that, all at once, is anybody's guess," he said.

Tribal Worldwide's head of strategy Phil Dearson told Sky News it could have cost Google an estimated $500,000 in the few minutes the servers were down.

"This is completely unprecedented, I've never heard of anything like this before," he said.

"One or two of Google's services have gone down in the past, like Gmail and Google Apps, but they both happened separately.

"It's a massive surprise for all of Google's services to go down at the same time.

"It's probably a physical infrastructure problem given the size of the outage, but it's hard to know at this stage."

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